No gravity, one gun, no problem: Shattered Horizon interview

Shattered Horizon brings first-person gun battles to space, and to be an …

Shattered Horizon is a weird beast. The $20 first-person shooter features four maps, one gun, and takes place in space. That means there is no gravity—you can attack from any angle by using your boosters. Turn them off and move with just your inertia to become harder to spot. It's a heady, tense form of combat.

It's also the first game from FutureMark Games Studio—you may know them from the popular 3DMark benchmarking program. The game requires Direct X10, meaning if you're running Windows XP, you're out of the game. It's a new engine with fully three-dimensional game mechanics, and you have to be running either Vista or Windows 7 to play. Clearly, there was some vision involved with the project.

We were able to sit down with Antti Summala, the game's lead designer, to talk about the game. The scope may be limited, but Shattered Horizon has some big ideas behind it.

Ars Technica: Were you nervous about creating a game that required Vista or Windows 7? There was some grousing on our forums from Windows XP users. Was the trade-off ultimately worth it?

We have read similar comments from XP users on our own forums. Going DirectX 10 only wasn't an easy decision, especially in early 2008 when we started work on Shattered Horizon. Throughout development we kept a very close eye on the Steam hardware survey and the data from our benchmark users, slowly watching the numbers move in the right direction. It did cause some nerves, but overall the benefits outweighed the risks: a single code path made developing the game faster, and supporting it became much easier. Instead of putting our limited resources into sorting through all the challenges of backward compatibility, we can better support our community by adding new features and content to the game. With Windows 7 getting a good reception from gamers and Christmas coming up, the number of people who can’t play Shattered Horizon is only going to get smaller, while the number who can play will continue to grow.

This is your own engine. Did you have this game in mind while creating it, or did the game come after the engine was finished? Describe what you wanted the engine to do.

We started out with a game concept and developed new technology to meet the requirements of that concept. Only the renderer uses previous assets, as it's based on 3DMark Vantage, Futuremark’s DirectX 10 benchmark. Everything else was either built from scratch or used middleware we licensed and integrated into the engine.

We set off to make a zero-gravity multiplayer first-person shooter, and that placed specific demands on the engine. For example, physics simulation and network code both play a very important part. The renderer was developed further to support the game's artistic vision of "real space" environments, such as the harsh light in vacuum, sharp shadows and hard contrasts between lit and unlit areas, with associated techniques like dynamic tone mapping.

Will you be licensing the engine, or is it strictly for your own projects?

We're working hard to gain a reputation as a game studio that makes fun and innovative games. Now that Shattered Horizon has been released, we'll concentrate on supporting the game and its player community. The engine licensing business, on the other hand, is different from game development. Licensing our engine and tools and all the work that entails—for example, committing to product updates and finding and supporting clients—would sidetrack us from our main focus of making games. That's why we're not looking to branch in that direction right now.

How hard is it to design a game of this nature? Nearly everything is 3D these days, but this is one of the rare games that actually uses all three dimensions.

That's a good point, freedom of movement in all three dimensions makes a huge difference to gameplay. Zero-gravity level design was one of the biggest challenges in creating Shattered Horizon and one we spent a long time wrestling with.

In most multiplayer FPS games, levels are designed to constrain players to certain paths to control the flow of the game, which is the opposite of what we wanted to achieve. We had to come up with a new set of rules for designing levels where players can go almost anywhere.

We experimented with many prototypes before selecting the four levels that are currently in the game. Each provides a different zero gravity experience but there are some common factors. Level geometry in Shattered Horizon acts as cover from line of sight and fire, it guides players towards team game objectives, and players can land on any surface no matter what the orientation.

We wanted to keep the core gameplay distinctly FPS and not make a space dogfight game with spaceships that look like astronauts. To this end we designed two distinct movement modes: you can fly using your rocket pack or walk on surfaces. When attached to a surface, you trade some of your movement speed for more accurate shooting.

Placing surfaces at slightly different angles to each other can create a local topography, similar to uneven terrain in traditional FPS games, which provides cover that players can use to gain an advantage. Setting these surfaces at greater angles to the player's natural horizon creates small, temporary battlefields that change the rhythm and orientation of the fight in interesting ways.

The ability to use all the space and every surface in a level makes it feel much larger and varied—especially when you reorient yourself to a different surface. When players get used to it, zero gravity movement makes games very fluid and mobile. Flanking options are almost limitless in zero gravity, especially on open levels, and that makes camping harder than in many other games. Surprising your opponent from an unexpected angle is a lot of fun.

These are some examples of useful rules and fun scenarios for 3D level design that we found through experimentation. The rules continue to get tweaked and added to as we test new levels and receive player feedback but with this set of guidelines for truly 3D level design it's becoming much faster and easier to develop new levels.

What kind of feedback are you getting from players? Is there something you needed to fix quickly, or anything that proved unexpectedly popular?

We ask for and get a lot of feedback from our players, and much of it is in line with our vision for Shattered Horizon. The main thing players notice is that freedom of movement in zero gravity means that Shattered Horizon cannot be played in the same way as other FPS games. If you charge headlong into confrontations expecting to run and gun you will get killed over and over again by more experienced players. We think this is what some reviewers are referring to when they talk of the game having a steep learning curve.

In fact, Shattered Horizon is very easy to play and the controls are very simple for anyone who has played an FPS on a PC before. The challenge is learning new strategies to use the freedom of movement to your advantage. For some players, it takes a bit longer to break old FPS habits before they start using these new tactics and learning new skills.

We are very active with our communities in our forums and elsewhere. Even our support tools were chosen with community in mind. The most common requests are for additional content such as new levels and game modes. We're committed to releasing new content in free updates, and right now we are in the process of developing and testing four new levels that will be released as the Moonrise pack when they are ready. Our experience with our closed beta was so positive and we found beta tester feedback so useful that we're doing closed testing for our content updates as well. We've set up a special program called Arconauts, where a select group of players help us test new content before it's released to everyone.

You asked whether we were surprised by anything proving unexpectedly popular. There is a good example that comes from our closed beta. Before it started, we were sure that beta testers would come up with zero gravity tactics we might never have thought of. However, we imagined they would at least involve shooting. Instead, one player single-handedly popularized a combination of melee combat and movement tactics. If you understand zero gravity movement, know the maps well, and aren't too risk-averse, you can be very effective using the melee attack as your main weapon.

Melee in Shattered Horizon was designed as a last resort weapon or a way to flaunt your skills by using an inferior weapon. However, combined with complete freedom of movement, the melee attack's one hit kill capability can make it a formidable weapon. It's a great example of how different zero gravity gameplay is from a gravity bound FPS. The resulting popularity of melee combat during the beta contributed in part to our decision to add more support for stealthy tactics in Shattered Horizon.

How did you land on the size of the game in relation to the price point? Did you always know you wanted to create a smaller, less-expensive game?

We knew the size of the game long before we knew what the right price would be. Shattered Horizon is our first title and although we are ambitious, we are also realistic. We knew we wouldn't be able to make a full-priced, big budget, campaign-driven game straight away. That type of game requires too much content for a small team to manage. And as Shattered Horizon was primarily self-funded and self-published we knew we had to stick to a sensible scope for the game design.

The best solution was a multiplayer-only title, and the concept we created for Shattered Horizon called for a unique combination of multiplayer FPS action and zero gravity combat. Knowing our limits meant we could focus on making that concept as good as possible. For a budget game that costs just $19.99 I'm very proud of the level of polish we've been able to bring to the game.